TRICIA LOOTENSgraves as with dragons' teeth: "These Dead be seeds of life, and shall
encumber / The sad heart of the land, until it loose / The clammy clods and
let out the Spring-growth / In beatific green through every bruise" (I.
663-66). Charles Albert of Piedmont, whose abdication opened the way
for Italy's reunification under his son Victor Emmanuel II, lies in such
uneasy soil; so, too, does the hastily buried Anita Garibaldi, who "outfaced
the whistling shot and hissing waves," at the side of her husband, the
nationalist leader Giuseppe Garibaldi, "until she felt her little babe unborn,
/ Recoil, within her" (I. 678-81). The "hope and omen" of the original
child's song are thus vindicated; and as Casa Guidi Windows closes, the
"brave blue English eyes" (I. 738) of the speaker's own "young Florentine"
(I. 747 ) - her Italian-born son - prophesy that "elemental / New springs of
life are gushing everywhere" (I. 761-62). The "earth's alive, and gentle or
ungentle / Motions within her, signify but growth! - / The ground swells
greenest o'er the labouring moles" (I. J6^-6J). With this shocking equation
of a swelling, moving, and pregnant body, soon to gush new life, and the
unquiet Italian earth, under which patriots rest and moles tunnel, Barrett
Browning literalizes and nationalizes "Mother Earth," even as she radically
transforms Hemans's association of soldiers' graves with feminine divine
law.
As the Risorgimento's ultimate success became clear, Barrett Browning
returned to what Flavia Alaya calls the "revolutionary archetype" of an
Italy at once "mother and child," delivered "out of her own flesh." 25 In the
politically problematic "Napoleon III in Italy" (i860), for example, patriots
"feel the underground heave and strain" (EBB 149) as Italy "rises up at the
shout of her sons, / At the trumpet of France, / And lives anew" (129-31).
It is in the posthumous volume Last Poems (1862), however, that Barrett
Browning most powerfully revisits her carnal vision of the birth of nations.
Like so much patriotic poetry, "Mother and Poet" is an occasional piece: at
its center stand the wartime deaths of both sons of the Italian nationalist
poet Laura Savio. Torn between maternal sorrow and national triumph,
Barrett Browning's Savio is a far cry from Hemans's innocent victims of the
masculine state. "/ made them indeed / Speak plain the word country"
(EBB 21-22), Savio mourns: "/taught them, no doubt, /That a country's a
thing men should die for at need" (22-23). Granted, Savio, too, now lives
in exile on earth: pointing "above the star pricked by the last peak of
snow," she cries, "My Italy's THERE, with my brave civic Pair" (88-89). She
will write no triumphant music, no "great song for Italy free" (4):
Forgive me. Some women bear children in strength,
And bite back the cry of their pain in self-scorn;262